Spelling of international names on this site follows these simplified rules:

Special charactersAll special characters like Ä or Ü are converted to their closest character value (not phonetic value). This is simply for sake of easier typing as phonetic value of 'ä' would be 'ae' whereas character value would be just 'a'. Also, this is the common practive when typing foreign names on keyboards that do not have special characters, a practice that originates from print media.For example, Tommi Mäkinen is written as Tommi Makinen.

SpellingNames in languages that use non-latin alphabets like cyrillic, arabic or asian are spelled in their romanized form. This rule is difficult to enforce as names are sort-of-romanized by their actual owners or organiser clerks. These pseudo-roman versions seep through, unfortunately.